Putin’s Credo: Never Let Them See You Sweat

LONG ago, at the inception of his rise to power, Vladimir V. Putin recounted a memory of growing up in the late 1950s in a Soviet communal apartment in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known. For kicks, he and his friends would chase rats in the building’s dismal hallways. It was what passed for a game until the time a cornered rat hurled himself at a surprised and frightened young Vladimir, who turned and ran away.

The anecdote, vivid as a nightmare, was meant to highlight the hardscrabble roots of Russia’s future president, but in the years since, self-effacing recollections like these have all but disappeared from Mr. Putin’s official biography.

Instead, Russians have ingested a regular diet of televised acts of leadership and machismo, from hectoring bureaucrats and oligarchs to excelling at sports, including his latest form of kicks, ice hockey, which he took up with remarkable determination when he was turning 60. It has made him a caricature of the man of action, of the benevolent but remote leader, of the steely patriot delivered by providence to restore Russia to its rightful destiny after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet the rat story, and its vanishing, echo a recurring theme in episodes through Mr. Putin’s childhood and his formative years as a minor officer in the K.G.B., during his unexpected ascent to the presidency in the 1990s and his steady consolidation of power since 2000: namely, his insecurity and fear of displaying weakness.

Although he liked to portray himself as a young tough raised in Leningrad, he took up martial arts as a slight boy, by his own account, to protect himself from courtyard bullies.

His most searing experience in the K.G.B. came in East Germany in 1989 when the sclerotic Soviet state proved, in his mind at least, irresolute in the face of the protests that brought down the Berlin Wall and ultimately the Iron Curtain. When a crowd of protesters reached the K.G.B.’s villa in Dresden, where he was stationed, he confronted them alone and unarmed and, without any orders from Moscow, warned that those inside would open fire. In his recollections the “mob” was terrifying, though it amounted to only a few dozen people.

In the wild 1990s, when a convulsion of violence and crime accompanied the advent of capitalism in the newly renamed St. Petersburg, he once sent his daughters out of the country for their safety. During the re-election campaign for his boss in St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, he took to carrying an air pistol — “It won’t save me,” he told a friend, “but it makes me feel calmer.”

“We demonstrated weakness,” Mr. Putin said in another context, “and the weak are beaten.” That was in 2004, following the terrorist siege of a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan, which ended after two and a half days with the deaths of 334 hostages, 186 of them schoolchildren. To him, the attack — which he insinuated, without evidence, had been orchestrated by Russia’s enemies abroad, not the Chechen terrorists who actually carried it out — and its aftermath signified neither resilience nor resolve but utter vulnerability.

He exploited the horror of the attack to tighten his control of the political system.

The fear of displaying weakness has become a shrewd pillar of Mr. Putin’s political identity. And to the dismay of the country’s democrats and world leaders with whom he interacts, it has made him extraordinarily popular and powerful, even though in moments of candor and, of course, in private, officials in Russia acknowledge the overwhelming problems the country faces.

On Monday, Mr. Putin will swagger through New York, delivering a speech at the United Nations for the first time in a decade, meeting with an evidently reluctant President Obama and seeking to regain the spot on the world stage he believes he has been unjustly denied by his rivals in the West. In Russia’s sycophantic official media, this is another triumph, of course, but even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers could not resist the schoolyard bravado, saying the Russian leader was “stealing Mr. Obama’s lunch money.”

Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center recently noted that “rising from one’s knees” was a “distinctively Russian metaphor” for restoring dignity and national pride. And on their knees is where many Russians believe they spent the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union — until Mr. Putin single-handedly wrenched them back to their feet.

What Mr. Putin has succeeded in doing is persuading Russians that the hardships they now face — many of them a result of his own decisions — are evidence of efforts by Russia’s enemies to keep the nation weak.

“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many citizens felt humiliated by defeat in the Cold War,” Mr. Kolesnikov wrote in an essay published on the center’s website. The annexation of Crimea in 2014, the defiance of Western sanctions, and now even the exertion of Russian military power in Syria are all antidotes to the country’s ills. “These past humiliations have been obliterated by the construction of a besieged fortress within the country’s expanded borders.”

He concluded, as many have, that Mr. Putin’s tactics have been strong — often compared to his training in judo — but that he lacked a strategy. A year and a half after the occupation and annexation of Crimea, Mr. Putin has never been as isolated politically and diplomatically. He has few foreign allies and faces a withering economy at home, battered by the low price of oil and economic sanctions imposed in retaliation for the Kremlin’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine.

The latest intervention in Syria, more than four years after the war there began, signals a growing desperation about the fate of Bashar al-Assad’s government — and the Kremlin’s own concerns about what its fall might mean. And in part it may be a move to distract attention from Russia’s disastrous intervention in eastern Ukraine and looming questions over its culpability in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, which killed 298 people.

And yet as he has always done, he has responded to weakness by daringly ignoring it, even defying it. Throughout his 15 years at the center of Russian politics it has worked.

Steven Lee Myers is a Washington correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.”